Surprise te reo Māori finding in pre-diabetes research

New research from the Healthier Lives National Science Challenge has found people who speak te reo Māori have a reduced risk of progressing from prediabetes to diabetes.

The groundbreaking research, which has been published in the Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice journal, observed more than 14,000 participants with prediabetes. The study, led by researchers at the University of Otago’s Wellington campus and including collaborations with the National Hauora Coalition, Waikato DHB, and the University of Waikato, aimed to identify potential traits that could protect or progress a patient towards diabetes.

Lead author Dr Andrea Teng, a senior research fellow with the University of Otago’s Department of Public Health in Wellington, says the study is the first to examine pre-diabetes progression to diabetes in New Zealand.

“We were able to look at this by age, sex, ethnicity and socioeconomic position. This information could help direct pre-diabetes programmes to those who need it most,” she says.

The research found that Māori and Pacific peoples had a greater rate of progression from pre-diabetes to diabetes. This is largely because they had more advanced pre-diabetes at the time it was diagnosed through higher HbA1c levels.

However, one of the more unexpected findings from the study was a correlation between the patient’s ability to speak te reo Maōri and a drop in progression to diabetes.

“A cultural protective factor was the evidence of an association between speaking te reo (Indigenous language, with 87 per cent of te reo speakers being Māori) and 19 to 88 percent lower progression to diabetes, independent of age, sex, income, education, deprivation, ethnicity and HbA1c,” the study reads.

“This finding suggests that language and cultural identity are positive for health, particularly in Indigenous communities” say the researchers.

The paper is the first study to find a relationship between diabetes and Indigenous language.

Co-author Dr. Nina Scott from Waikato DHB says the language factor was one of the most novel findings from the research.

“There was evidence for the association between te reo Maōri and pre-diabetes progression even after adjusting for socioeconomic factors,” she says.

Dr Scott says further work needs to be done to assess the full value of te reo for health and the importance of a cultural connection.

“It may be that people who speak te reo are protected from diabetes in other ways from those who don’t that we could not measure in this study,” she says.

The study is a collaboration from two of Healthier Lives National Science Challenge flagship research projects, and brings together health researchers, communities and big data experts to answer important research questions in a new approach to research. This study aimed to specifically answer questions about the incidence of diabetes in Māori communities and will help towards addressing and reducing New Zealand’s large inequities in health care.